Truths suppressed by the Establishment and society generally, and analytical overviews of reality to deepen understanding. All contents copyrighted. Brief quotations with attribution and URL [jasonzenith.blogspot.com] permitted.
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Friday, October 19, 2012

The Democrats have a never-ending scam they trot out every 4 years when they're running their man
(maybe a woman, someday; unfortunately it will probably be another Clinton) for
President. They fill people with dread, using scary stories of what the
Republican Bogeymen will do when they "take over" and get to make
appointments to the Supreme Court. Their very subtle argument runs along the
lines of this:

“JUST ONE (or two or three)
APPOINTMENTS WILL SHIFT THE BALANCE OF THE COURT!! THEN YOU'LL LOSE YOUR RIGHT
TO ABORTION!” the Democrats and their auxiliaries screech, to induce
people to go vote for them.

Excuse me? A few points are in order here. Reactionaries have been
controlling the Supreme Court since Nixon's day. In fact, except for the
aberrational Warren Court, the Supreme Court has always been deeply reactionary and hostile to human rights. And
none of the 5-person majority reactionary bloc on the Court is about to retire.
So there is NOTHING hanging in the balance because there already is a rightwing majority and there’s been one for over a
decade.1

More tellingly, and this really exposes the Democrats as deeply
cynical con artists, the present membership of the Court is DUE TO THE
DEMOCRATS as much as it is to the Republicans.

Take these very glaring examples of despicable Democratic
complicity with the GOP in creating andimposingon us the arch-reactionary Court
of today.

Antonin Scalia, a horribly fanatical rightist, was confirmed by
the U.S. Senate 98-0 in 1986. And I remember that it was obvious at the time
how awful he was- his confirmation made me nauseous. In what eventually turned
out to be ironic, and poetically just, then-Senator Al Gore was one of those 98
culprits. It serves the bastard right that Scalia was one of the five who stole
the 2000 election from Gore, crushing his lifelong dream and ambition to become
President. But don't cry for Gore: that made member of the nomenklatura is now filthy rich, with a net worth of around
$100,000,000. That's one hundred million, in case all those zeroes confused
you. [Sources:Forbes,
CNBC,Fast Money, and many
others.] [The Gang of Five GOP operatives on the Supreme Court who stole the
election were Scalia, Rehnquist, Thomas, O’Connor, and Kennedy.]

Another of the GOP Gang of Five that stole the 2000 election from
the hapless Democrats, Sandra Day O'Connor, was confirmed by 99-0, in 1981, in
yet another fine example of "bipartisanship," i.e. the ruling
political class marching in lockstep to oppress us. O’Connor started as an apparatchik of the extremely rightwing
Arizona Republican Party.

The lifelong nasty GOP apparatchik and Nixon hatchet man, William
Rehnquist, another product of the Arizona GOP (that also gave us that fanatic
avatar of the Right, Barry Goldwater) was confirmed first for Associate Justice
and later as Chief Justice (under fascist butcher Reagan) by 2 to 1 margins by
the Senate. This despite the fact that he cut his political eyeteeth by
suppressing the votes of Latinos in Arizona, confronting and intimidating them
in polling stations and challenging their right to vote. Then he lied about it
later in his Senate confirmation hearings. That's ok; politicians are very
forgiving of liars since they're liars too, so they have a natural affinity and
sympathy for fellow liars. (Unless they're enemies of the U.S. Then they
denounce them in high moral dudgeon.) Rehnquist was Chief Justice and part
of the 5-4 majority in the Bush v. Gore Florida recount case.

Yet another career reactionary operative, Chief Justice John
Roberts, was given a “bipartisan” stamp of approval, voted in by 78-22, a 3.5
to 1 margin, in 2005.

Kennedy, an alleged "swing" vote on the court who helped
the GOP steal the 2000 election, was confirmed in 1988 in another squeaker,
97-0. But Samuel Alito was given the green light by a less impressive 58-42, in
2006. (Well would ya look at that! Some Democrats actually voted against putting our fates in the hands
of a reactionary, for a change!)

And in what may be the worst example in the modern era of the
Democrats’ complicity in the evil of giving so much power over our lives to
vicious reactionaries, one that needs special emphasis (particularly since the
bourgeois establishment has done such a bang-up job of consigning it to the
memory hole) is the case of the perverse (in several ways) Clarence Thomas, a
man who seems to hate blacks as much as a typical Southern white racist. (That’s
one way he’s perverse. Another way is, of course, his history of vulgar sexual
harassment. Then there’s his image of himself as an 18 century member of the
American landed gentry. His so-called “judicial philosophy” is nothing but
nostalgia for his imaginings of how swell it must have been to be among their
number, transliterated into legalistic mumbo-jumbo.)

At the time of Thomas’ ascension to the high court from hack GOP
apparatchik (1991), the Senate was controlled by the Democrats. And the
Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who oversaw the confirmation
process and very public hearings, was none other than one Joe Biden, the
current Vice President of the United States. Beneath his slaphappy political
goofball exterior, Biden is one venal, malign fellow. He’s especially big on
repressive legislation, including of the “drug war” variety. (It was his idea
to make club owners criminally liable for Ecstasy use on their premises. Hark,
what Herald of Freedom Joe Biden is!)

Biden ran interference for Thomas to get him onto the high court
despite Anita Hill’s revelations. It was Biden who blocked other witnesses who
could corroborate Thomas’ behavior. And it was Biden who spread the word among
the Democratic Senators that Hill was a liar, thus providing the crucial margin
for the reactionaries’ 52-48 victory. You see from that margin what a close-run
thing it was. The GOP couldn’t have done it without Biden.

We know this from the scrupulously documented, devastatingly
detailed book, Strange Justice: The
Selling ofClarence Thomas, by
Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson. Abramson has since risen in the bourgeois
hierarchy to become editor di tutti
editors, the boss of all editors at the NY
Times. So she has no excuse for not knowing better, and not assigning
articles to remind people.2

So in fact, in most instances anywhere from few to no Democratic
Senators vote against the extreme rightwing nominees the GOP puts forth to pack
the court with. And Obama is so uninterested in lifting even a pinkie to resist
the reactionary packing of the judiciary- part of a long term conspiracy by
hard rightist lawyers in the Federalist Society, the GOP, and the top echelon
of the corporate oligarchy. Lewis Powell, that corporate lawyer also put on the
Supreme Court by the unholy alliance of Democratic and Republican Senators, wrote
a memo before his ascension to Infallible Justice that was a clarion call
mobilizing the reactionary corporate elite in this endeavor.

Meanwhile “liberals” mostly vote for these hard right wing
nominees, only occasionally putting on a show of pseudo-resistance when the
people they need to con raise a fuss. I say “pseudo-resistance” because they
never go beyond “expressions of concern” and voting against, knowing full well
the votes are there to confirm- unless they actually want to block by, say
filibustering, or putting a hold on nominees. (Only takes one Senator to put a
hold on. I’m not sure if that is “allowed” for Supreme Court nominees, as is
commonly done with other executive branch nominees that some reactionary in the
Senate doesn’t like, or occasionally for purposes of extorting legislative
favors or money for their state’s business interests.)

The other thing “liberals” do is tell the chumps who they want to
vote Democratic every four years that the sky is about to fall if the GOP wins
the Presidency and appoints more Justices.

Take, for example, The
Nation magazine. The cover, and most of the issue dated October 8th
was devoted to the “the Supreme Court hangs in the balance with this election!”
line of propaganda. The issue harps on the pro-big corporate bias of the Court-
as if the Democratic Party isn’t a
pro-big corporate Party. One dishonest article entitled “How The Right Packed
The Court” completely ignored all the help the “Right” got from the Democrats in packing it.3

This article is a good example of how something can be accurate
factually yet present a false picture of reality. By omitting the Democrats’
role, the article does not provide readers with the information they need to
understand fully the cause of the problem, and certainly guarantees NO
SOLUTION, EVER, as the implication (explicated elsewhere) is that the solution
is to elect Democrats to the White House. I think reality and experience has
conclusively proven that is NOT the solution. That is a guarantee to remain
mired in an oppressive system with no escape route.

The Nation magazine crowd are Democratic Party
cowboys. Cowboys in the sense of what actual cowboys do. Their job is to herd progressives into the Democratic
Party corral, to keep lefties politically
penned up inside the Democratic Party’s
fence, ideologically confused and politically neutralized so as not to pose any
possible threat to the system of power. And these cunning political cowpokes roughly
round up strays who are tempted to actually vote for people who want to change
things, such as a Nader (who the Nationites
savagely attacked for having the effrontery to think he had a right to run for
President), or any Green or Socialist or whatever alternative. Just as cattle rustlers
steal cattle, Nader was accused of “stealing” Democratic votes. (Guess you
didn’t know you were the Property of the Democratic Party! Maybe they should brand us!)

Leftists are supposed to just dutifully go to the polls every 2 or
4 years and participate in the staged elections by voting for the Democratic
head of the two-headed beast, validating the “democratic” legitimacy of the
two-party corporate dictatorship we (and a lot of other people all around the
world, in effect) exist under. Anyone
who is serious about pro-human change in the world has to become a conscious
enemy of the system. That’s certainly how the system treats all progressives
anyway. The secret police explicitly designates left of center dissidents as “terrorists.”
Obama has sicced the Federal prosecutors around the country on activists,
including in Seattle and Chicago. The FBI and the entire panoply of repressive
organs of the state behaves no differently towards people who challenge the
corporate status quo under Democratic regimes than under Republican ones. Fake
progressives epitomized by The Nation
are a sophisticated technique for neutralizing potential threats to the system,
NOT vehicles for change, regardless of their usefulness as information sources.

1)Remember something called Bush v. Gore?
The bourgeoisie prefer that you don’t remember it, since stolen elections
contradict their main propaganda themes- that the U.S. is the epitome of
democracy. Of course, lots of things contradict that, like the fact that for
most of U.S. history most adults were legally barred from voting. Or that there
was a coup in 1963 in which the CIA, in league with the FBI and military,
assassinated the President of the U.S., with “the” media acting as accessories
after the fact to this day.

The only reference to Florida 2000 you ever get from “the” media
these days is “hanging chads,” an extremely misleading meme. Lately we have
learned from Greg Palast that the ballots were deliberately manufactured with
the chads mispositioned so they would not be properly punched out.

Anyway, the Democrats and their cowboys blame their loss in 2000
on Ralph Nader. If only he hadn’t run, the GOP and Florida Governor Jeb Bush and
his gang wouldn’t have arranged to steal Florida, and their 5 operatives on the
Supreme Court wouldn’t have blocked a recount! Nader caused all that! And Al Gore would have won his home state of
Tennessee! And Gore and the Democrats would
have objected to the brazen, racist disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of
black voters! And the DemocraticSupervisor of Elections for Palm Beach County, Theresa LePore, who designed a ballot
that duped thousands of elderly Jews into voting for notorious anti-Semite
Patrick Buchanan (much to that fascist’s amusement) wouldn’t have done that except for Ralph Nader! And “the”
media wouldn’t have been blatantly biased against Gore throughout the entire
campaign while going easy on former cokehead-alcoholic-war-dodger-National
Guard-no-show Bush! It’s all Nader’s
fault that Gore lost, I tell you!! Can’t you see that?

You see, the “democratic process” can’t work if there are more
than two candidates. It can’t work if anyone tries to challenge the monopoly on
political power held by the two corporate capitalist pro-U.S.-Imperialism
parties! Allowing anyone to run outside the two-party dictatorship would just
lead to anarchy! Why would you want to mess with The World’s Greatest
Democracy? That’s why states make it so incredibly difficult for anyone not
anointed by one of the two (two’s plenty!) parties to even get on a ballot.
That’s why Democratic and Republican politicians pass convoluted, arcane,
voluminous election laws. That’s why their lawyers go to court to get
Democratic and Republican judges to throw people (like Nader) off the ballot,
invalidate their qualifying petitions to get on the ballot, etc. It’s because
they’re so dedicated to democracy and the people’s right to choose “their”
“leaders.” Let’s not be cynical here.

2)The New
York Times ran an editorial October 16th decrying all the
Federal Court vacancies and upbraiding the Republicans for putting their petty
partisan political interests above the Good of the Nation. It makes a passing
reference to the next President possibly making Supreme Court appointments. It
also briefly mentions Obama’s “slowness” in even nominating judges to the Judiciary. How diffident, passive, and
Hamlet-like our Assassin-in-Chief can be about some things! Undecisive!

3)No surprise that the Democrats’ crucial
role in the court-packing wasn’t mentioned at all. First, it’s in TheNation,
an organ put out by Democratic Party stooges, and second, it was penned by one
William Yeomans, whose background is given in a footnote as a former chief
counsel to Senator Edward Kennedy, a former “Justice” Dept. apparatchik who
spent 26 years there, a legal director of something called “Alliance for
Justice,” a program director at the “American Constitution Society,” and
currently a “fellow in law and government” at American University. (Busy
fellow! He must be very talented! Or considered politically reliable.) In short, this is a man steeped in
Democratic Party politics. I wouldn’t expect a former chief counsel to the “liberal
lion” Kennedy to say anything uncomplimentary about Democratic Senators, would
you?

Wednesday, October 03, 2012

One thing the U.S. knows how to do is
“make economies scream” (in the notorious words of Nixon, giving
Richard Helms, CIA gestapo boss, his marching orders on Chile in
1970, being told by his leader to “make the economy scream,”
according to Helms' notes of a meeting with Nixon). It's done it to
Iraq, it's been trying to do it with some success to Cuba for 50
years, and now it's doing it to Iran. The Iranian currency just
plunged 50% in a week, and is continuing to plunge. A full-fledged
currency panic and loss of confidence is in train. (You see, “Bibi”
Netanyahu? All We Are Saaay-ing, Is Give Sanctions A
Chance.)

An Iranian rial will now get you an
American dollar- or rather, 37,000 rials will buy you a buck.
That's a lot more than the 24,600 rials it would have cost you a week
ago. The rial is down over 80% year to date. (Talk about Weimar
Germany-style inflation and currency debasement! I hope the Iranians
stocked up on wheelbarrows already- the U.S. Is probably getting set
to embargo those too. Maybe the U.S. will let some wooden barrels
through so Iranians will have something to cover themselves with when
their clothes wear out.)

Of course, the question that is never
asked or answered in the U.S. media is: what if Iran says “uncle”
and knuckles under to U.S.-led demands? The assumption the gullible
U.S. public is allowed to believe is that then sanctions will be
lifted. Not so. There's a propaganda technique at work here, that I
called Deception by Omission.

The “offer” on the table from the
U.S. Is this: Iran, shut down and demolish the Fordow uranium
enrichment site (the one that's under a mountain that our bombs can't
destroy), and hand over ALL your enriched uranium, and then MAYBE
we'll EASE the sanctions.

I kid you not. That's the U.S. “offer”
on hand.

Now maybe that's just a hardball
negotiating position, to give the U.S. some bargaining room. But then
there's the matter of U.S. Law.

As the latest rounds of sanctions was
passed by Congress at the end of July, various Congresspeople
stipulated that in order for the sanctions to be lifted, not only
does Iran have to completely dismantle its nuclear program, it must
also let its people vote the mullahs out of power i.e. Congress is
demanding regime change to lift the sanctions- and abandon Hezbollah
and Hamas, i.e. give Israel a totally free hand to do with them as it
wishes. It's called “The Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Human
Rights Act of 2012.” Funny title. “Accountability” of course is
U.S. Imperialist code for “we're gonna make you pay for crossing
us.” And the chest beating putative concern for the human rights of
Iranians is just ludicrous, on many grounds, but I'll mention just
two in passing: 1) the sanctions hurt the Iranian people most of all,
and 2) the U.S. Imposed a brutal dictatorship on Iran from 1953 to
1979, during which a quarter of a million Iranians were killed, the
CIA mentored the world's most savagely torturing secret police, the
SAVAK, and Amnesty International branded the Shah's regime the worst
violator of human rights in the world- which is quite something,
considering the competition.

You
see, until the Iranians “come clean on their nuclear program, end
the suppression of their people and stop supporting terrorist
activities, they will face deepening international isolation and even
greater economic and diplomatic pressure,” Senator Tim Johnson,
Democrat of South Dakota, said.
(AP, 7/31/12, in NY Times, “DealStruck to Tighten Sanctions Against Iran.”)

And the
always execrable Florida Republican RepresentativeIleana
Ros-Lehtinen, who sponsored the bill in the House, brayed that the
latest law attacking Iran“blacklists
virtually all of Iran’s energy, financial and transportation
sectors, and cuts off companies that keep doing business with Iran
from access to our markets in the United States.”
This Stateswoman heads the House Foreign Affairs Committee. (Oh,
here's a surprise- she really really hates the Castro regime in Cuba.
No, really, she does.)

Our
good Congresspeople also wanted to punish the directors and
shareholders of Swift, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial
Telecommunications, which handles interbank transactions, unless they
stop providing services to the Central Bank of Iran, thus cutting
Iran off entirely from the world financial system. (The official,
aboveground system anyway.) They didn't go that far- yet.

But
maybe they don't really mean it. After all, it barely squeaked
through the House by 421-6.

At
the time the bill passed. Binyamin (his actual name) Netanyahu and
current War Secretary and lifelong apparatchik Leon Panetta (his last
gig was overseeing assasinations at the CIA) stood shoulder to
shoulder and jointly issued a bellicose statement telling Iran that
“time is running out” and other threatening language.

Of
course, this is all about power, and the desire to prevent Iran under
its current regime from acquiring more leverage in the region, NOT
about a threat to Israel's survival. The Iranian mullahs aren't the
mindless fanatics the Taliban are, nor are they like suicidal car
bombers. They know what would happen if they launched a nuclear
attack on Israel. (It would take them years to develop miniaturized
warheads that can be carried on missiles, and to build enough
missiles to penetrate Israel's anti-missile defenses, plus Israel has
an arsenal of several hundred warheads, and by the way, Israel's
backer the U.S. has thousands of nuclear weapons, and for icing on
the cake, Britain and France also have nuclear arsenals, and are
allies of Israel.)

So here's how the propaganda technique, of misleading the
public by omission, what I call Deception By Omission, works. You
bury the crucial facts in the fine print and let the blaring trumpets
and pounding drums drown out the whispers of critical information. Of
course, people who go over printed media with a magnifying glass
every day, and recall the one-time mentions of significant facts, and
recognize their importance, AND remember them, aren't fooled. But
everyone else is. We can't say “the media” didn't report it. See,
they reported it! (Some did, anyway, one time.) But it's hardly the
impression that's conveyed by the deluge of “coverage” we are fed
on this issue. (And others as well.)